Reverent Flora: The Arabian Desert's Botanical Bounty

Diana Woodcock holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where she researched poetry's role in the search for an environmental ethic. In 1974, she earned a B.S. degree in Psychology, and in 2004 an M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing. She has worked as a counselor with delinquent youth, an editor of a young women's magazine, and a teacher of English as a second language. For nearly eight years, she lived in Tibet, Macau, and on the Thai-Cambodian border, teaching and working with refugees. Since 2004, she has been teaching creative writing, environmental literature, and composition at VCUarts Qatar. She is the author of seven chapbooks and six poetry collections, most recently Heaven Underfoot, winner of the 2022 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award; Holy Sparks, a finalist for the 2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award; and Facing Aridity, a finalist for the 2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature. Her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant's Shoulders, won the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net nominee. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2008, Women's Review of Books, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Humanities Review, Spiritus, Comstock Review, and other journals and anthologies. Her grand prize-winning poem, "Music as Scripture," was performed onstage in Lincoln Park, San Francisco, by Natica Angilly's Poetic Dance Theater Company at Artists Embassy International's 21st Dancing Poetry Festival.

About the Author :
Diana Woodcock holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where she researched poetry's role in the search for an environmental ethic. In 1974, she earned a B.S. degree in Psychology, and in 2004 an M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing. She has worked as a counselor with delinquent youth, an editor of a young women's magazine, and a teacher of English as a second language. For nearly eight years, she lived in Tibet, Macau, and on the Thai-Cambodian border, teaching and working with refugees. Since 2004, she has been teaching creative writing, environmental literature, and composition at VCUarts Qatar. She is the author of seven chapbooks and six poetry collections, most recently Heaven Underfoot, winner of the 2022 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award; Holy Sparks, a finalist for the 2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award; and Facing Aridity, a finalist for the 2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature. Her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant's Shoulders, won the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net nominee. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2008, Women's Review of Books, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Humanities Review, Spiritus, Comstock Review, and other journals and anthologies. Her grand prize-winning poem, "Music as Scripture," was performed onstage in Lincoln Park, San Francisco, by Natica Angilly's Poetic Dance Theater Company at Artists Embassy International's 21st Dancing Poetry Festival.

Review :
"The elements of the desert are each, like William Blake's 'grain of sand in Lambeth, ' a visionary commentary and a prophetic disclosure of Creation in its severe, abundant Fact. In Reverent Flora, Diana Woodcock amplifies this severe abundance into a new form, a new sacrament of praise. And this praise is in itself prophetic, and in itself a greater love. Here is a book of radiant attention." -Donald Revell, author of Canandaigua and Drought-Adapted Vine "The plants of Diana Woodcock's Reverent Flora: The Arabian Desert's Botanical Bounty are sometimes defined by science, often act as spiritual instruments, and usually offer health and nutrition. But they are always heroic and vibrant, and they somehow manage to sidestep the categories human culture assigns them . . . Here's 'a toast, ' then, to Diana Woodcock and to the moonseeds and jujube and 'the smallest blossom opening / briefly . . . / to take us all the way to heaven.'" -Cara Chamberlain, author of The Divine Botany and To Gaze Upon Their Loveliness "The poems in Diana Woodcock's Reverent Flora: The Arabian Desert's Botanic Bounty achieve something remarkable: They make the desert bloom . . . With the sensibility of a Romantic poet and the precision of a scientist, Woodcock examines the surprising richness of the desert's plant life, weaving the region's language, religion, literature, and culture into its climate and geography . . . [In] her exploration of 'The Twenty-two Most Mentioned Plants in the Quran, ' Woodcock's meticulous attention to detail breathes imaginative life into the land and its cultivation." -Diane Burton, associate editor of Nimrod International Journal "From our perspective, we can't have too many science poems in response to a non-scientific political age. Buy a copy and place it where people will pick it up and read it." -Valerie Lawson and Michael Brown, editors of Off the Coast and publishers with Resolute Bear Press